Together

I found myself once again dissecting a Christmas song, as I do every year. This season’s Christmas ID from a well-known television network highlights a familiar trio: love, joy, and hope. These are the virtues Christmas is meant to inspire, even as we navigate the many trials that define our times. It’s easy, almost effortless, to say that we should love one another, be joyful, and hope for the best. However, for many Filipinos, these words ring hollow. Their Christmas has been marred by rage and grief, spent with one less person at the table after the floods claimed yet another life.

The idea of “togetherness” feels heavier now. It reminds me of the traditional Filipino game of “tiyakad” or bamboo stilts. To move forward, you need complete coordination. This includes hands steady, grip secure, legs rising and landing in unison. One misstep sends everyone tumbling. We often repeat that old cliché: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” But the question we rarely confront is: How far are we willing to endure discomfort to truly go together?

Because the reality is that there are forces pulling us apart. When communities drown, when families wade through chest-deep water in the dark, when relief fails to arrive on time, it isn’t just because of nature. It’s because corruption has slowly eroded our ability to move as one. Corruption diverts funds meant for flood control, siphons budgets intended for drainage, and delays projects that could have saved lives.

We often speak of calamities as though they are great equalizers, but they aren’t. They expose, with terrifying clarity, who has been protected and who has been neglected. The wealthy experience inconvenience, the poor experience catastrophe. In places where rivers overflowed and entire neighborhoods drowned, residents spoke of blocked waterways, stalled government projects, uncollected garbage piling up year after year. The flood didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from choices: human choices, political choices --made long before the rain.

With every tragedy, the call is always the same: we must unite. We must be resilient. We must come together. But how can people be expected to walk in unison when others have been running away with the public’s money? How can we talk about hope when accountability is missing from the conversation? Togetherness requires trust, and trust cannot grow in a place where corruption is allowed to thrive.

Still, I believe in the possibility of going far together if we choose it. If we demand it. If we refuse to let the narrative end with grief. Communities helping each other during the floods showed us what genuine togetherness looks like: strangers rescuing strangers, neighbors opening their homes, volunteers braving the currents. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

This Christmas, perhaps togetherness is not about perfect harmony. It’s about collective insistence: insisting on accountability, insisting on better systems, insisting that the next storm doesn’t claim another life. Love, joy, and hope can only thrive when justice is part of the season.